Up to the present, the process of making an encrusted jam product has been almost completely carried out by hand. Namely, in this process, an individual round dough skin (hereafter called "dough skin") is first made which is rolled by hand or machine. A jam ball i.e. a ball of sticky edible paste material, is then put on the dough skin by hand or depositing machine. The dough skin is then placed on the palm of the left or right hand, and the edge or skirt of the dough skin (hereafter called "skirt") is rerolled all around by fingers of the other hand. Finally, the dough skin together with a ball of jam or other sticky edible paste material is puckered up and around by the fingers of both hands.
Further, since the puckered part of the product has seams the product is pressed down by hand onto a pan for panning with its seam side down. After panning, the product is passed onto the next steps of proofing and baking.
As mentioned above, much of the process is performed by hand and thus a mass production operation, product make-up laborers must be employed. Furthermore, there is a problem that products made by hand have a tendency to be unstable in quality and size owing to the variation in finger skill among make-up laborers.
At the same time, instead of the above hand work, many attempts have been made on a trial basis to automate the process using machines having mechanisms for extruding and encrusting. These attempts have, however, been unsuccessful. The reason these prior attempts have been unsuccessful in the case of fermented bread dough is that, the gluten structure of the dough has a tendency to be destroyed when extruded from a narrow nozzle so that the crumb texture of products after baking becomes very weak in spite of improved recipes for dough materials or adjustments of the method of extrusion. In particular, during the first one or two days after baking, the crumb texture rapidly becomes moistureless and the products are apt to tear very easily, and yet this period just coincides with the time period that the products are put on sale. Therefore, the crumb texture is a very critical quality of the product.
In order to solve the problem mentioned above, the inventor has spent many years developing an automatic make-up machine equipped with a mechanism for performing finger-work which does not harm the bread dough and yet may be used for mass production.